FROM THE EDITOR

Richard Nunan
College of Charleston

I want to begin by thanking Larry May (Philosophy, Washington University) and Bill Edmundson (Law, Georgia State) for contributing law review abstracts to this issue of the Newsletter. I'm also especially grateful to Carl Wellman for doing such a fine job of putting together a good group of solicited articles for this special edition of the Newsletter, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the passage of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. (See Carl's Guest Editor's Introduction below for details.) Unrelated to Carl's efforts, this issue also includes a useful bibliography of philosophical literature on rape and law governing rape crimes, supplied by Keith Burgess-Jackson of the University of Texas at Arlington.

Finally, I would like to thank Jim Nickel (Philosophy, Colorado) for serving as Chair of the APA's Committee on Philosophy and Law these past three years. Jim was certainly helpful to me during the transitional period in which he and I simultaneously assumed our respective offices, and he has been a diligent organizer and facilitator of committee business ever since. Indeed, he is currently hard at work trying to arrange for some speakers on the subject of the Universal Declaration at the next Eastern Division meeting of the APA. Jim will be replaced as Committee Chair this summer by Bernard Baumrin, of Lehman College in the City University of New York.

Topics and topic editors for the next three issues of the Newsletter are as follows:

Fall '98
LAWYERS' LOYALTIES
Submission Deadline: June 15, 1998
Editor: John Kleinig
241 Sixth Avenue, #10C
New York, NY 10014
jikjj@cunyvm.cuny.edu

To whom should lawyers be loyal? To themselves? To their clients? To the courts? To the general public? To more than one of these? In cases of conflict, which loyalty should take precedence? Much of the discussion of this issue has focused-for understandable reasons-on the loyalty that lawyers should have to their clients, in particular their obligation to be zealous advocates for their clients' interests. This has been justified not only by reference to accused individuals' entitlement to have their rights defended, but also to the public value of a system in which individual rights are secured against the significant resources of state power. Yet many observers have been unhappy about the practical implications of such zealous advocacy: the apparently tunnel-vision promotion of client welfare at the expense of justice, victims, and seemliness. Such critics have argued accordingly for a constrained account of the loyalties of lawyers, properly understood.

Spring '99
Special Joint Issue: Newsletter on Philosophy and the Black Experience in Law
CRITICAL RACE THEORY
Submission Deadline: December 15, 1998
Editors: Jesse Taylor
Department of Philosophy & Religious Studies
Appalachian State University
Boone, NC 28608
taylorj@appstate.edu
(704) 262-3089

Richard Nunan
Department of Philosophy & Religious Studies
College of Charleston
Charleston, SC 29424
nunanr@cofc.edu
(843) 953-6522

The editors of the newsletters on Philosophy and the Black Experience and Philosophy and Law are pleased to announce a joint issue devoted to Critical Race Theory.

This body of scholarly literature is in part an outgrowth of the Critical Legal Studies attack on the rights-based discourse of traditional liberal legal theory, and in part a reaction against the abstract level at which that critique is conducted. CLS has successfully drawn attention to the extent to which liberal advocacy of purportedly universal human and civil rights has often masked and promoted various parochially economic and class-based political motivations. But Critical Race theorists contend that most CLS scholars have conducted this debate at the same level of abstraction as their liberal targets, failing on the one hand to appreciate the practical usefulness of rights rhetoric for minorities seeking real advances in equal citizenship through strategies of legal intervention, and failing on the other hand to recognize the full extent to which abstract conceptions of rights have been merely formal. To communicate both of these problems more effectively, Critical Race scholars often abandon the universal voice of conventional legal theory in favor of narrative writing in a first- or third-person voice, a strategy they share with some feminist legal theorists, and with those who write about sexual orientation and the law.

In light of the current push to use traditional liberal rhetoric about purely formal "objectively neutral" rights of equal opportunity as a theoretical excuse to dismantle affirmative action programs at both state and federal levels (e.g., appeals to the ideal of a color-blind meritocracy), a review of the perspective developed through Critical Race theory seems especially timely. Articles or inquiries may be submitted to either of the editors.

Fall '99
THE DUTY TO OBEY THE LAW
Submission Deadline: June 15, 1999
Editor: William Edmundson
College of Law
Georgia State University
P.O. Box 4037
Atlanta, GA 30302-4037
wedmundson@gsu.edu

The question, "Why should I obey the law?" introduces a puzzle as old as antiquity. The puzzle (often referred to as "the problem of political obligation") is especially troublesome if we think of cases in which breaking the law is not otherwise wrongful, and in which the chances of getting caught are negligible. Philosophers from Socrates to H.L.A. Hart have struggled to give reasoned support to the thought that we do have a general moral duty to obey the law but, more recently, the greater number of learned voices has expressed doubt that there is any such duty, not even a prima facie one. Doubt here calls into question the nature of authority and the very possibility of a legitimate state. This issue will devoted to the duty to obey the law, its nature, its existence, and its role in legal and political philosophy.

If you are interested in submitting an article to be considered for inclusion in one of the forthcoming issues, it would be prudent to send an inquiry in advance, briefly describing your proposed topic. Space is very tight in the Newsletter, and there is room for only a few articles in each issue. Since the Newsletter aims for broad coverage of the range of issues relevant to a particular topic, it is unlikely that two articles which treat of the same subtopic will be published. Advance inquiries will also enable guest editors to furnish prospective contributors with more detailed information about the formatting requirements for submissions. In any event, authors should restrict their contributions to 3,000-4,000 words (about 12 pages, double-spaced).

Please mail inquiries concerning article submissions to the individual editor designated for the relevant issue. All other inquiries (e.g., concerning possible announcements, suggestions of possible law review articles to abstract, notices of new books of interest, etc.) should be sent directly to me (see Spring '99 issue above for address).

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